I know what you’re thinking! How can you write neo-cyberpunk and singularity video games and not have an Evil A.I.?! Well, buckle-up because we don’t do things the way we’re expected to! The sinister, Evil A.I. is a staple of modern sci-fi and cyberpunk storytelling, almost cliche at this point, but the dark promise of a sinister AI is something that never manifested on Vegas Prime. Though possibly in deep history there may be a lurking story about something being covered up, there’s nothing like this right now. Generally speaking, imprints in Vegas Prime Retrograde are enamored with the amazing potential of humankind. In, VPR, our AI are poets and philosophers, part of imbuing them with intelligence was giving them the ability to dream and invent, to wish and to hope.

Sure, the less sophisticated forms of AI sometimes have sinister outcomes unfold. Typically these aren’t negative by nature, but the humans that create them haven’t realized the full outcome. An example of this is using machine learning to make things more efficient -- only to discover that some of the negative sides of what is being automated are *also* more efficient. Garbage in, garbage out.

Militarization and The “Terminator”

Even now, AI has long been employed in military applications. The horizon is pretty dark, with destruction and murder essentially being automated. This is relatively true for VPR’s history as well. But in VPR, the military has been dismantled and repurposed for deep space resource gathering to support the large increase in population and the broad distance that humankind has reached into the stars

Though there have been military applications in the distant past, there are no Terminators so far. I guess we paid attention to pop culture, eh?